Day: December 19, 2007

With the release of the Mitchell Report, everyone’s talking about steroids in baseball like it’s a brand new issue all over again. No, this isn’t Eat My Sports, but–as a lifelong sports fan (though not overly knowledgeable of individual stats)–I’m taking a stand. If professional athletes want to use steroids, HGH and whatever else sucks nads to grow muscles, go ahead.

And no, this isn’t a satire. I really mean it: I don’t care if baseball greats are caught juicing. If they break a Hall of Fame record in the process, put their name on a plaque. And while you’re putting their name up there next to old-timey heroes, don’t include an asterisk for steroid use.

OK, now that I’ve pissed off the purists, I guess I should explain myself. It’d be an awfully short TifS if I didn’t.

If you were to go all the way back to Abner Doubleday, then it is easy to see how much baseball has changed. But all of those changes made it easier to break records.

How could Lou Gehrig or Cal Ripken play so many consecutive games with broken or dislocated fingers? They couldn’t, but thanks to glove makers stitching the fingers together, they were OK. But beyond that, they also never took a sick day on a game day. Considering nutrition, medicine and fitness innovations since Lou Gehrig managed to catch Lou Gehrig’s Disease (what were the odds?), Cal’s name would have an asterisk by it at the very least.

Baseball seasons are much longer now (almost too long), which makes it easier for players to beat Hall of Fame records in less years. So not only would Barry Bonds have an asterisk by his name, but so would Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Hank Aaron and pretty much everyone else if you set the Wayback Machine to the earliest days of the sport.

While steroids may or may not actually increase the odds of hitting a 100-mph fast ball, or even increase the power of a bat swing, it’s irrelevant to consider how much it’s changed the sport compared to when it started almost 200 years ago. It’s no more of a cheat than the advent of the breaking ball.

Also to consider: would it be cheating if they all did it? Instead of allowing a few individuals hog all the glory, imagine if batters on steroids also faced pitchers, fielders and umpires on performance-enhancing drugs. It’d be the greatest game ever played, complete with more bench-clearing brawls because of ‘roid rage.

But purists will complain that the allure of baseball is that anyone with natural ability should be able to compete. The level of natural competition is so great in the majors now that guys that were good in high school or college already stand no chance of playing professionally. Even though we aren’t in the auto industry, we all complain when an autoworker is replaced by a robot in the factory, but we also enjoy it when our cars break down less because of manufacturer error.

And then, of course, there are the health hazards of steroids. I’m not going to downplay them: your testicles will shrink, you might grow bosoms and you will have violent mood swings. So if a professional wants to risk all this, why not?

Adults volunteer for castration and breast augmentation all the time, yet we don’t consider either ruining the nation. Actually, castration is held as a boon to public safety as a treatment for sex offenders. And we all have seen how big fake boobies have kick-started and sustained many careers.

There are also plenty of chemically-unbalanced adults who revel in violent mood swings. If it weren’t for them, boxing would be a very dry sport. So what if a ball player, who might already be a jerk, decides to become a bigger jerk?

Other health hazards attributed to anabolic steroids are heart problems, cancer and increased acne. You know what else has those hazards? Everything. Red meat, complex carbohydrates, cell phones, fat, cigarettes, booze, cars, construction …. The real challenge is to name something that doesn’t cause all that.

We have yet to render all of the things that cause cancer, heart disease or acne illegal because people would revolt, even though two of those are at the top of leading causes of death. (Can acne kill? I bet there’s a case somewhere.) Hell, we tried once already with alcohol, and we still can’t get rid of the mob today.

But as with cigarettes and alcohol, we’re worried about youth emulating their heroes. If professional athletes decide to risk their reproductive lives by using steroids, then what incentive do high school and college athletes have stay clean?

Here’s one: steroids are illegal. Possessing anabolic steroids without a prescription is a felony, but where are the arrests? Despite all of our talk about cleaning up baseball and keeping offenders out of the Hall of Fame, no one has served hard time. So if baseball was really, earnestly super-serious about getting rid of steroids users, Commissioner Bud Selig would work with real criminal authorities (read: not Congress) and institute a bona fide sting operation to send drug abusers to prison.

Instead, our response is to suggest putting an asterisk by their names when they get into the Hall of Fame. And that’s why I really don’t care if grown men endanger their lives and “ruin” sports legacies: nobody is treating them like actual criminals.